Are You Experienced? is the perfect book for the reluctant traveler. This quick and entertaining novel is about a 21st-century explorer who’d really rather not. Dave, the hapless British narrator, is taking a year off between secondary school and university. He’s saved a wad of cash from his time folding socks at the Sock Shop in King’s Cross (where "your life begins to have so little meaning that you start wondering if you’re still alive . . . you even start doubting whether or not socks actually exist") and from his safe, boring job waiting tables in a Swiss Hotel. Still, when his friends start taking off for their mind-expanding treks around the world he feels nothing but annoyance: "There was a general belief that a long and unpleasant holiday was of crucial importance to one’s development as a human being."

Fate steps in though. Well, Fate or Lust. With everybody he knows being away, Dave is thrown into a friendship of convenience with his "nominal best friend" James’s gorgeous girlfriend Liz. First she wins his heart by supporting his desire to not travel. Then she tantalizes him with stories of how much she misses the sex with their mutual friend. Then, before you know it, she suggests they head off to India together since neither of them is busy for a few months. A picture pops into his head of "a Spartan hotel room with a marble floor, a ceiling fan and Liz and me fucking like bunny rabbits on a huge double bed . . ." and in less than one second of thinking it over, Dave and his hormones have decided to spend three months in India.

Which turns out to be even worse than he imagined. Possibly because, in his sex-starved state, he has been using neither imagination nor listening skills. Everyone told him India would be hot, for example, but he didn’t realize how hot it would be. And it occurred to him to wonder what backpackers do all day, but he didn’t actually give any thought to what he’d be doing all day, once he took to the road. He finds that most of the time in each exotic town is spent in queuing to get tickets for the next place, but he gets very angry when a cynical older person points this out to him and questions its value.

The cruel and sexy Liz, who holds the blame for his getting this life experience in the first place, deserts him when she runs into a pair of upper-class school friends who are in India washing lepers. The three women head off to an ashram where Liz–who has been self-righteously preserving herself for her absent boyfriend–immediately "goes Tantric" with the yogi. After all, it’s India, so it must be spiritual.

In the battle to resist experience, Dave ultimately loses. Travel wins. In spite of laziness, horniness, ignorance, egoism, and some carefully-cultivated cynicism, even Dave can’t help growing during three months on the sub-continent. Bouts of excruciating loneliness and debilitating diarrhea, thousand-mile bus rides, conversations with phonies of all nations, cheap drugs, curried lentils, and spectacular evening light eventually have an effect on him until he actually starts thinking of himself as "Dave the Traveller." He doesn’t go so far as to praise travel itself, but the book is ultimately a paean to the value and the pleasure of having traveled.

This is the second novel for the 30 year-old Sutcliffe, and it’s full of lively characters, whose quirks and youthful pomposity are never exaggerated past the point of believability. In some ways, Are You Experienced? is one of the most honest travel books around–most homages to the thrill of foreign travel leave out the part about the airplane seat that won’t recline, the "lamb" burger in a country with no sheep, the exhaustion and irritability that make you start to hate even the people you thought you liked–and yet it is also without a doubt one of the most fun. Sutcliffe’s irreverence has a sly message–and a belly laugh–for just about anyone.

First Serial Rights © 2001 Heather Liston

Heather Liston studied Religion at Princeton University and earned a Masters degree from the NYU Graduate School of Business Administration. She is the Managing Director of the National Dance Institute of New Mexico, and writes extensively on a variety of topics. Her book reviews and other work have appeared in Self, Women Outside, The Princeton Alumni Weekly, Appalachia, Your Health and elsewhere.

Categories: Fiction